Trailblazer in psychotherapy Minuchin dies of heart disease

Salvador Minuchin, an iconoclastic child psychiatrist who revolutionized 20th-century family therapy by bringing the whole clan into the room and tugging their emotional strings like a master puppeteer, died Oct. 30 at a nursing facility in Boca Raton, Florida. He was 96.

The cause was heart disease, said his son, Daniel Minuchin.

The origins of Minuchin’s work in what came to be called Structural Family Therapy took root in his work with delinquent boys and impoverished families in the ghettos of Philadelphia and New York. Many of his contemporaries in the 1950s and ’60s considered his patients clinically unreachable.

An Argentine-born Jew who felt the sting of anti-Semitism in his early life, he became a rare champion of the underclass at a time when psychotherapy was largely reserved for the well-to-do.

He became one of the pioneers of a therapeutic movement that challenged Freudian techniques by focusing not on a single identified patient but on the patient’s entire family.

The center he later founded in Manhattan still treats families and trains therapists, and his 1974 book, “Families and Family Therapy,” is considered a field manual for mapping out how dysfunctional families interact.

He asked families to act out their problems in his office, pinpointed their troubled choreography and rewrote it on the spot.

Minuchin helped pioneer the notion that each of us is shaped by the family system in which we live, as he once put it, “with all its potential for both destruction and healing.”

Salvador Minuchin was born in San Salvador de Jujuy, a town north of Buenos Aires, on Oct. 13, 1921.

After earning a medical degree from the University of Cordoba in Argentina in 1947, Minuchin went to Israel to serve in the Israeli army. His interest in families first surfaced in the late 1940s, when he worked with children of the Holocaust and Jews who emigrated to Israel from Arab nations.

He began his psychoanalytic training in 1954 at the William Alanson White Institute in New York and began taking on the hard cases of delinquency and poverty that many in his field considered beyond help.

Under his direction from 1965 to 1975, the Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic, in the heart of the inner city, became known for cutting-edge family therapy treatment and bold experimentation.

After retiring in 1996, Minuchin settled in Florida with his wife since 1951, the former Patricia Pittluck, a developmental psychologist. She died in 2015.